Environment

Socialists organised in the parties of the CWI have highlighted
potential barriers to exponential Chinese economic growth. One of these
is the topic of this book, the environmental crisis that is current and
growing. When a Billion Chinese Jump by the Guardian’s Asia environment
correspondent, Jonathan Watts, takes the form of a dark, political
travelogue. Watts travels through China’s provinces talking to Communist
Party bureaucrats, capitalists, and ordinary farmers and workers about
the impacts on their lives of the environmental changes wrought by the
economic ‘miracle’.

Remote Yunnan straddles the border with Burma, Laos and Vietnam. It
covers only 4% of Chinese land mass but contains over half of its
vertebrates and plant species and 72% of its endangered animals. Since
1950 its forest cover has halved. Tight logging restrictions were
introduced by the government in 1998, yet timber companies have logged
40 million square metres of forest since, almost fifty times the
permitted limit. This highlights a theme of Watts’ book, even when the
national government is moved into passing legislation to protect the
environment; its writ often means little on the ground.

In Tibet, heroic feats of human engineering have seen a road and railway
more closely link the province with Han-dominated China. The
environmental impacts of this resulting growth is expected to mean a 3.4
degree calcius rise in temperature by 2050, which in turn is shrinking
the permafrost and buckling the railway line. Sichuan is known for its
reservoirs, of which there are 87,000 in China! The rush for development
means that dams are sometimes built on seismic fault lines.

Watts arrived in the province four days after a magnitude 8 earthquake
destroyed the Zipingpu dam. Seconds after the quake, four million people
became homeless and 87,000 drowned in an area as big as Belgium. The
government had been warned about the dangers of building the dam but the
promise of a steady supply of water and 3.4kWh of annual electrical
generating capacity for the provincial capital of Chengdu proved too
tempting. Two years later the quake destroyed everything. Dam building
was also a feature of the Great Leap Forward, an irresponsible frenzy of
unrestricted and ill-thought out growth by the CCP bureaucracy during
the 1950s. By 1980, 2,796 dams had failed with a combined death toll of
240,000.

Watts points out that hydroelectric plants appear to be green because
they emit no carbon. However, local governments encourage chemical and
smelting plants to move near dams as electricity generated in remote
areas cannot be economically supplied to the national grid. These plants
require power in the dry season too, so open coal-fired power plants are
required and this means mines being dug nearby. “The result of this
cycle is that clean energy turns dirty very quickly”.

The horrific industry of breeding rare animals for restaurants and
pharmacies is exposed by Watts. At Xiongsen the number of captive tigers
has gone from 12 in 1992 to 1,300 now which the wild population has
collapsed from several thousand to fewer than fifty. Today there are 164
captive breeding centres farming rare species such as scorpions, black
bears, musk deer and golden coin turtles.

Guangdong has a massive rubbish industry, based on recycling or
outsourced dirty manufacturing from the advanced capitalist world.
Container ships transport manufactured exports from China to the West
and then return filled with the rubbish of the West. In the past, the
return cargo was Indian-grown opium. It’s illegal in the EU and US to
dump rubbish and recycling is promoted. In practice this means exporting
rubbish to China, especially to Guangdong. The often toxic waste has
health implications for locals. The amount of lead in the blood of
children in Guiyu is 50% higher than US standards.

Watts explains that environmental concerns are the second most important
driver of social unrest after illegal land seizures. In 2005, they led
to 5,000 mass incidents, 128,000 smaller disputes and 500,000 letters
and petitions. His account of a pitched battle he witnessed between
2,000 riot police and 20,000 villagers in Zhejiang is breath-taking. For
several days the town was in the peoples’ hands until reinforcements
arrived.

Watts explains that in Xinjiang, authorities see the biggest terrorist
threat stemming from 36,000 ordinary people who had lost their
investments in an ant-farming pyramid-selling scheme that had collapsed.
“Salvador Dali could not have painted a more surreal picture of China’s
business landscape”.

When a Billion Chinese Jump explains how the West has partially
outsourced its pollution problems to China and, in turn, the coastal
provinces have shifted the worst polluters to poorer western provinces.
In 2007 the World Bank estimated the annual cost of pollution in China
at 5.8% of GDP. Add on erosion, desertification, soil decline and
environmental degradation and this figure rises to 8-12% of GDP “which
would push China’s economy into reverse gear” claims Watts.

The urbanisation in China is the world’s fastest. Britain has five
cities of over a million people, China has over 120 – most are places
relatively unknown amongst Westerners eg Suqian, Suining, Xiantao and
Xinghua. During the first quarter of this century, half of the world’s
new buildings will be erected in China. 50,000 will be skyscrapers,
equivalent to ten New Yorks! The builders of course are construction
workers. Most live on site in huts. One building worker interviewed by
Watts worked 11 hours a day for 50 yuan (A$7.40).

The chapter on Shanghai concentrates on the xiaobailing (white-collar
princesses), the single women of the upper working class or middle class
that drive internal consumption in China. The number of KFCs has risen
from one in 1987 to 2,000 now in 400 Chinese cities. 15% of Chinese
people are obese. The average Shanghai person owned two mobile phones,
1.7 air conditioners, 1.7 TV sets, more than one fridge and spent 14,761
yuan a year, about 70% higher than the rest of the country. Watts
highlights the speed of this change: “my family in the UK had a phone
three generations before my Shanghai contact, but her parents went
online four years earlier than mine”.

Worst drought for half a century in Yunnan

The cesspit of China, environmentally-speaking, is Henan. 100 million
people live in the area twice the size of Scotland. “It is the centre of
poverty, cancer clusters, Aids, slave labour, skewed sex ratios due to
selective abortions, birth defects, murder, counterfeiting and murder.”

From the 1980s, the local government encouraged rampant growth welcoming
the worst polluters that other provinces rejected. The worse is probably
the Lianhua Gourmet Powder Company, the biggest Chinese producer of
monosodium glutamate food flavouring. Every day the plant discharges
120,000 tons of wastewater. Pollution slicks of up to 70 kms in length
are common. Most of China’s 100 ‘cancer villages’ are found near these
slicks.

Henan is also the centre of the Aids health scandal, where the poor sold
their blood for cash. By 1995 Henan was a Chinese blood farm. “Plasma
was extracted and remaining blood pumped back into the people’s veins…In
the rush, basic hygiene procedures were sacrificed and the blood they
got back wasn’t always entirely their own. As a result, innumerable
donors became infected with HIV.”

Watts explains that the core of pollution comes from the coal industry
that generates 69.5% of the country’s energy. This industry has seen
170,000 miners killed from tunnel collapses, explosions and floods since
1980 – a rate 30 times higher than in the US. The importance of coal to
the economy explains China’s reluctance to agree to real carbon targets.
“Between 2003 and 2008, the power sector expanded at a rate of more than
two new coal-fired 600MW plants per week, adding more to the grid each
year than Britain’s entire installed capacity after two centuries of
development”. This puts the fight to stop another coal-fired power
station in Victoria, Australia and recycling generally into some context!

The fight to save the planet from environmental self-destruction has to
be linked to an international fight to overthrow both capitalism and the
bureaucracy in China. Only then can a plan of production along sane and
safe lines be democratically-developed by people’s governments. To
demand real action on the environment from governments who protect and
promote the polluters is utopian.

A future sane democratic and genuine socialist society in China would
transform fuel into electricity or gas near the source and transfer it
via power lines or pipes, as Watts himself argues for. Chinese farmers
use twice as much fertiliser and insecticide as their US counterparts.
“This includes arsenic to artificially boost crop yields and melamine to
disguise the low level of protein in milk.” China is also now the
biggest polluter of the Pacific Ocean with regular media reports of
sewage, fertiliser and industrial waste being dumped and heavy metals
accumulating in the mud and in the organs of fish.

This fascinating book is written by a journalist of quality and
therefore the often depressing and fact-rich text is lightened by the
touch of a first-class writer. Watts finishes with some political
conclusions. He outlines the gradual shift to stiffer environmental
legislation by the central government in Beijing. However, this is
tempered by the fact the environment department lacks a national network
and “at a regional level, environment departments continue to answer to
local governments…who ignore the (central) state’s disclosure laws on
pollution”.

For example, China has more nature reserves than any other country but
“definitions of reserves are vague and penalties for violations so low
that rules are easily circumvented by developers. Local governments are
often hostile to reserves.” Another fact is that when nature reserves
are created they are “not chosen because of the area’s rich ecology, but
because of its collapsed economy”. China plants more trees that the rest
of the world combined, but “the trouble is they tend to be monoculture
plantations. They are not places where birds want to live”.

The destruction of native forests is driven by the fact that China is
world’s biggest user of pulp and timber. “Despite the introduction of
domestic logging controls in 1998, Chinese demand destroyed more forest
than ever.” One legal expert claims that only 10% of China’s
environmental laws are enforced. Watts claims that “China’s political
system now exhibits the worst elements of dictatorship and democracy:
power lies neither at the top nor the bottom, but within a middle class
of developers, polluters and local officials whom it is difficult to
hold to account.” However, a mass uprising of workers and farmers can
change this.

But the early stages of government action to protect the environment are
totally overshadowed by plans to produce liquid coal as an alternative
to petrol and oil. “This technology could completely undermine efforts
to put the country on a cleaner growth track”.

Flooding in China

When a Billion Chinese Jump exposes the sham ‘green’ housing estates
created in some cities, mainly as a real estate gimmick. “The unflushed
savings of water would be tiny in comparison with the lakes being gulped
down by mining and coal liquification facilities”. Attempts at improving
air quality in cities like Beijing involve shifting polluting plants to
the inland provinces and replacing a dozen small dirty chimneys with a
single towering smokestack. “China’s greenhouse-gas output will more
than double between 2005 and 2020, despite the government’s promise to
reduce the carbon intensity of the economy by more than 40%”.

When a Billion Chinese Jump adds to the growing library of recent books
on the Chinese economic miracle and like all other offers no realistic
solutions. Towards the end, Watt turns to Buddhism and Daoism as sources
of potential answers. The real solution will stem from the Chinese
people themselves who have yet to speak about the mess their leaders
have taken the country. Despite its weaknesses in terms of conclusion,
When a Billion Chinese Jump fills in another piece of the jig-saw of
modern China.